After reinstalling windows (now running 8.1) on my main machine and connecting to a Hyper-V server running on my server machine (Hosting Win Server 2012, etc) I encountered a problem. For some  reason it said “Access Denied. Unable to establish communication between […]”. Googling around resulted in a find of this blog post by Philip Elder. These are the steps to solve the issue:

• Go to Component Services (%windir% -> search for  “dcomcnfg” and launch dcomcnfg.exe)
• Go to Console Root -> Component Services -> Computers -> My Computer
• Right click on My Computer and go to COM Security tab
• Click on “Edit Limits…” in Access Permissions area
• Select ANONYMOUS LOGON group and enable Remote Access permission
• Launch Hyper-V Manager and select required VM. It should connect without any issues

The information here is based on Philip Elder’s article. I recreated the set of steps in this blog post to make it easier for me to find this information when needed.